But something was off. Their voices were stilted and failed to sync with the movement of their mouths. Their faces had a pixelated, video-game quality and their hair appeared unnaturally plastered to the head. The captions were filled with grammatical mistakes.
The two broadcasters, purportedly anchors for a news outlet called Wolf News, are not real people. They are computer-generated avatars created by artificial intelligence software. And late last year, videos of them were distributed by pro-China bot accounts on Facebook and Twitter, in the first known instance of “deepfake” video technology being used to create fictitious people as part of a state-aligned information campaign.
“This is the first time we’ve seen this in the wild,” said Jack Stubbs, the vice president of intelligence at Graphika, a research firm that studies disinformation.
[We knew this was coming. However, it’s still tough to make this credible, as the article hints. These used people who aren’t known spouting information that can be rather easily checked. If the deepfake effort involves using more well-known media reporters or outlets, a simple check of their legit content will expose the fraud. This is more of a pot-stirrer aimed at people who are barely connected to news content, and will almost certainly prove of extremely limited propaganda value. — Ed]
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